Presidential cognitive issues

Well, you also have to wonder how a cognitively challenged, non-campaigning, foreign-entangled conflicted interests candidate could somehow garner the most votes in history? The most votes of any presidential candidate in history, and yet he could barely complete a sentence. 

Do they see this, or did they see this as a concern?

There is a cognitive possibility.

Also a possibility of just outright bullshitting.

Pick yer poison. 😬

Too funny!

Ted helped get my lights working

Wait one damn minute! 

Are you implying that there are times where Trump is completely full of shit?!

No.  His colostomy bag, maybe.  Sorry...I couldn't resist.🙃

Ummm - yes?

(It's been a really long weekend and I'm kinda wiped,  but I'm sensing some kind of trick question ...)

His entire campaign run was full of shit. The amount of outright lies he told is comical. The worst part is dumb fucks like you actually believe him. 😂

Add it to the list of things democrats care about now that biden is off to pasture. 

And that republicans no longer care about

Dangitdangitdadgummitdangitcrapthats horrible dangsonofaBdadgummitcrap dagnabbitDangitdangitdadgummitdangitcrapthats horrible dangsonofaBdadgummitcrap dagnabbitDangitdangitdadgummitdangitcrapthats horrible dangsonofaBdadgummitcrap dagnabbitDangitdangitdadgummitdangitcrapthats horrible dangsonofaBdadgummitcrap dagnabbit…

I Knew I should have voted for Kamalhead and Tampon Tim!!!!!!

Dangitdangitdadgummitdangitcrapthats horrible dangsonofaBdadgummitcrap dagnabbit!!!!

I have more concerns about your cognitive issues. 

I don’t think it’s something to completely ignore. There’s a family history of dementia and he’s almost 80. Confusion about people and eras is a red flag. Also, If you watch him speak 30 years ago he appears more articulate with a more extensive vocabulary. He’s also got little filter, and loss of inhibitions can be a symptom of dementia. But perhaps he never really had much of a filter to begin with. Or you get old and grouchy and stop giving a shit. 

Red flags notwithstanding, I’m not sure there’s much cause for concern for a few reasons. It seems to me that he’s still very articulate if he’s speaking about something he knows well and likes. I remember several years ago a press conference veered into the topic of real estate and it was remarkable to me how different he sounded. He was clearly knowledgeable, speaking with obvious expertise and complete coherence. I’ve noticed the same thing when he speaks about sports. He seems happy, engaging, and knowledgeable. Frankly, I don’t think he likes politics and doesn’t make much of an effort to learn anything more than he absolutely must - which is odd given his position. He strikes me as being like the kid who thinks he’s too smart to have to study. He gets away with it, but it’s not always pretty, and sometimes he compensates by making it up as he goes. 

If he has slipped, it’s possible that he’s naturally intelligent enough that a modest decline isn’t disastrous. If there is some decline, it’s a question of how much and what was the baseline. If you’re an idiot to begin with you can’t afford to slip much. 

None of us are diagnosing Trump’s cognitive health in any serious way. Biden’s decline was severe and obvious to the point where it felt cruel to put him in that debate. I don’t see that in Trump - not yet. 

It's a hot topic because after four years of a potato occupying the White House, with his wife, and countless people behind the scenes, guiding him through his very limited daily "functions", the issue of the blanket pardons, sentence commutations, and a supreme court appointment, are at the forefront of many questionable decisions.

And the rash of 5th ammendment protection statements being made by anyone questioned about his decline, and inquires as to who was truly running our country, is a hot topic.

So naturally the usual crowd here has to enter here and cry about our current president. 

Who, holds endless impromptu press conferences, answering questions on any subject brought up by reporters.

The unabomber copypasta thing was quite bizarre. 🤔

Edit:

Klain sits in the hot seat Thursday, on his own accord, without subpoena. 

Taking the shield of the 5th off of the table. 

It's a hot topic now?

This has been a hot topic for 6 years, at least. You only noticed this as a topic after the target changed.

Lifelong democrat here.  There ain't no way in hell what Joe, his handlers, or the party did was right.  I'd go so far as to say it was criminal. (I'm talking about his cognitive decline)

All I hear from the other side is..."they did it" or "look at the bad stuff they did"  Fuck that shit.  Your dad woulda whooped your ass if you tried to use that excuse when you fucked up.

It makes the people using that excuse look immature and stupid...and those that let them get away with it even worse.

There's just right and wrong fellas...and "right" does not mean what's right for "you".

Inventing situations that never happened are a sign of a normal, healthy politician. 

As far as Trump making stuff up, it's not that uncommon for powerful people to possess traits that would normally be considered delusional or even psychotic. A fundamental point that escapes many is that there are people who simply do not care all that much about the values that others would have them conform to, and that these people sometimes become powerful because of, not in spite of these traits. Such people don't just passively exist and accept the world as given- they create values rather than adopting the values of others, and they assert themselves in ways that reshape their world. They see it as their right to do so and they do not accept that their visions of their own grandeur are deluded because they really are changing the world.

This can sound rather insane, and it probably is. But before dismissing it as some fringe nonsense that I'm just making up, consider it in light of this excerpt from an article written in 2004 by Ron Suskind, replying to critics of the Bush administration:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."

Trump, probably without realizing it, seems to see himself as the successor to this tradition described by Suskind - as someone who takes it to the next level by not even pretending to care about satisfying the "reality-based community" and their insistence on fact and truth. He's not about to let a little detail like reality interfere with his aspirations - and as far as he's concerned, if you don't like it, too bad for you. To those who despise his aspirations, this will be monstrous, and obviously so. Others not only accept it, but rather enjoy the indignation it elicits. We see this playing out regularly between Trump's critics and apologists. The problem with many of his apologists is they're defending him while maintaining the same set of assumptions that his critics assume, thus missing the point of what they're defending. They assume truth is out there in the world waiting to be discovered, while the powerful people they're defending think that truth is something they are creating. 

Or Trump might just be a senile old lunatic with an unique combination of malignant traits and any deeper analysis beyond that risks dressing up his lunacy in a ridiculous fiction that it doesn't deserve. 

Managing an aging president with fluctuating cognitive ability, which gradually becomes more apparent over time, must be a tricky dilemma for any political party to navigate - Republicans may well discover this for themselves in the near future. In the end the Democrat party did the correct thing in talking him out of running for re-election but their failure to line up a more suitable successor (i.e a white male) much earlier effectively gifted the presidency back to the 'red team'. 

The Dems shot themselves in the foot, but they were caught in a difficult situation and not matter what they did would have been adjudged wrong. Had they publicised Bidens mental decline it would have undermined public confidence and international perceptions of Americas strength/reliability. Had they demanded Biden stand down so that Harris could take over there would have been a monumental meltdown by the right, in part because that's exactly what the right suspected had always been the plan. So the best they could do was to manage it as best they could until the election and clearly that wasn't co-ordinated very well.

Now what we have is the usual right wing fabricated outrage to keep their base aggreived. Outrage fabricated and coordinated by Trump, Fox News and James 'Tweedle-dum' Comer, who seems to be the GOPs 'go-to' propagandist for whatever manufactured scandal they can think up while the others concentrate on legislative work.

Biden was too old to run for president in 2020 and Trump, who was older in 2024 than Biden was in 2020, was too old to run last year. Not to mention the 1001 other blatantly disqualifying reasons...

But, but, but…Joe NEVER did it. Ever. 

Not even when he was a Truck Driver or a Train Conductor or a Black Rabbi.

🤣

Who actually watches abc anymore? Dear Lord

Why is abc even bringing this up? Oh yeah, because it was brought out that Biden was basically a vegetable. And now they’re trying to do a “gotcha” on Trump. You see that, right?

Doesn’t it even piss you off a little that you had a power group that used Biden to rob everyone? And that they rigged the election just so they could get filthy rich, at our expense?!

This has to be one of the most annoying threads I’ve read in awhile

Democrats, If you weren’t complaining about Bidens decline, you are a hypocrite 

Republicans, if you were complaining about Bidens decline, and can’t focus on Trumps, but can only bring up Biden, you are a hypocrite 

Trust me, getting the sheep from either team to think for themselves is a fools errand.

I've been the fool trying to do that in Non-Moto for a long time, all it gets me is hate and being shit on from both teams.

America is cooked, this thread is proof of that.

Biden was barely functioning by the end of his term and it was just sad (literally - I found it hard to watch). It felt in terribly bad taste to laugh at him (like going into an old folks home to laugh at the people who don’t know where they are).  Trump can be downright hilarious and he’s not such a zombie that it feels wrong to laugh. This has to be my all time favourite “WTF was that?” moment. If you can make sense of this, your powers of comprehension far exceed mine. 

That's not the reason you get shit on